Seen:『藤代冥砂写真展 “90 Nights”』
Who: Meisa Fujishiro
Where: Contact, Shibuya
When: 10pm June 23- 6am June 24th
In Japan lately there’s been a bit of a growing interest in photography from the 1990s. It seems enough time has passed and enough things have happened to provide enough distance to give the decade the look it deserves. One of the latest look-backs is of Meisa Fujishiro’s collection titled “90 Nights”. Fujishiro spent a lot of the 90′s in clubs snapping portraits of his fellow partiers with his Konica Big Mini. While he later went on to become a very successful photographer the nightlife negatives were stashed away for over twenty years.
“90 Nights” was first exhibited in May of 2018 at Book Marc- the gallery’s tall white walls placed the images in a he context of Art. The second showing of them- two hundred or so A4-sized inkjets prints taped to the walls of a club two stories under a Shibuya parking garage for a single Saturday night made for an entirely different encounter with the pictures. The lights, the throbbing music, the people in the way- the environment of the club was the perfect way to view these images.
Each time I’ve seen these pictures- both exhibitions and an hour with the accompanying photobook- It’s not how much time has passed that’s struck me, but rather by how different things are now. The young men and women in the images are some of the last of the population that had a smartphone-free childhood and adolescence. Certainly they went to these clubs to see and be seen, but the seeing was, for the most part, limited to the actual spaces themselves, those particular nights. If a photo was taken (and in his book Fujishiro notes many did show up with a compact 35mm camera in hand) it was for that moment- snaps free of the conformism, disconnect, and emptiness which looming digital monolith was to facilitate two decades later.
The showing of these pictures the night of the 23rd was a mix of the usual twenty-something club-scenesters (many with faces lit by phone screen glow) but also people in their late 40s, early 50s- indeed, some of the very individuals in the pictures on the walls were there that evening. And yeah, some of those same early 50-somethings posed for iPhone selfies against those walls.
As a final gesture to celebrate both photographs on paper combined with the experience of living life in real time among other people, Fujishiro invited club-goers to pull a print of their choice off the wall to take home with them. That’s keeping it real.